Visitors of various kinds make occasional but necessary visits to mines, mills, labs, factories, warehouses, and other industrial sites. Such visitors include management personnel, inspectors and other regulatory officials, attorneys, investors, and other people who have business at the site but do not normally work there. The results of such visits may have longlasting effects on both the site and the lives of the people who work there each day. It is important that such visits be conducted both safely and efficiently.
Unfortunately, materials and material-handling processes in industrial environments pose a variety of hazards to occasional visitors, including in particular hazards to the visitor's feet. For instance, acids, solvents, alkalis, and other chemicals are used in a wide variety of mining, manufacturing, and engineering applications. Many industrial environments also contain boulders, large pipes, concrete blocks, heavy equipment, and other objects which can seriously injure a visitor's feet by impact or by compression. Sharp rock fragments, nails, and similar objects also expose visitors to the risk of receiving puncture wounds in the feet.
In other situations the visitor may pose a risk to the environment. Thus, visitors near explosives or delicate electronic equipment must wear dissipating shoes and other gear to avoid building up a dangerous static electric charge. As used herein, "hazards" include risks created by a visitor to an industrial environment, risks created by the industrial environment, and risks created jointly by the visitor and the environment. Industrial environments include, without limitation, mining sites, manufacturing facilities, metal working sites, warehouses, airport and shipyard baggage handling facilities, and chemical research and development facilities.
Various means are available to control the interaction of workers with their daily industrial environment to the extent necessary to ensure the safety of each. Proper-training, safety procedures, and inspections are all important measures for minimizing hazards. In addition, employees whose feet are regularly exposed to chemical, impact, compression, puncture, electric shock, and static electric hazards in the course of their daily work are generally equipped with protective footwear. For example, chemical workers wear workboots that are made of materials chosen for their impermeability and their ability to resist corrosion and other effects of the chemical hazards in question.
Mining and construction workers likewise wear workboots that are equipped with protective toe boxes to resist impact and compression forces from falling rocks, rolling machines, and like hazards. The toe boxes, which are constructed of strong, rigid materials, cover the top and sides of the toes, and may extend beneath the toes. The toe box may also be extended or supplemented by a rigid metatarsal guard which protects the metatarsal bones of the worker's foot.
Unlike workers, visitors to industrial sites must generally choose between inadequate options. In some cases the visitor may choose to forego special protective footwear and simply wear street shoes during the visit. As used herein, "street shoes" include conventional dress shoes, running shoes, sandals, cowboy boots, other boots, socks, pumps, and other footwear which does not provide substantial protection against industrial hazards. Choosing to wear street shoes rather than protective workboots often places the visitor's feet at risk of being burned, crushed, punctured, shocked, or otherwise seriously injured.
A secondary drawback of simply wearing street shoes during a visit is that the street shoes themselves may be damaged, regardless of whether the visitor's feet are harmed. Grease, paint, sharp rocks, dust, mud, solvents, and other chemicals may all leave the visitor's feet unharmed while nonetheless ruining a good pair of shoes. An additional disadvantage is that the failure to utilize adequate protective footwear may be a violation of industrial safety laws and regulations.
Thus, the visitor may choose to remove the street shoes and replace them with a borrowed pair of protective workboots. Although this approach improves the visitor's chance of emerging intact from the visit it nevertheless has several disadvantages. For instance, the borrowed workboots are unlikely to fit properly. Workboots which are too large or too small may cause severe discomfort during the course of a longer visit. Moreover, boots that do not fit may cause the visitor to stumble at an inopportune or even a dangerous time.
To ensure a proper fit, a large selection of workboots of different sizes may be kept on hand. However, each pair of workboots typically costs somewhere in the range from $80 to is $150, so keeping a selection of different sizes on hand for use by occasional visitors may be financially impractical. Such a collection of workboots is also bulky and cumbersome to store.
The visitor who replaces street shoes with borrowed workboots also faces the unpleasant and unhygienic prospect of wearing shoes which were previously (and perhaps recently) worn by numerous other people. Moreover, the desired path during the visit may not take the visitor back to the location at which the street shoes were removed, so it may be necessary for the visitor to carry the removed street shoes by hand throughout the visit.
An alternative approach is for the visitor to obtain a personal pair of workboots rather than borrowing a pair. The street shoes are removed at the visitor's office and replaced by workboots, which are then worn to the industrial site. After the visit, the visitor wears the workboots back to the office and there replaces them with the street shoes. The street shoes are not exposed to industrial hazards because they are not taken to the industrial site, and the visitor's feet are protected during the visit by the workboots.
However, workboots are relatively expensive. Moreover, this approach poses a serious risk of contamination. Chemicals, grease, particulates, mud, and other substances carried from the work site on the workboots may contaminate the visitor's office, residence, or other areas of the community at large. Although rubberized workboots can be hosed off before leaving the site, such a cleaning is not always done thoroughly. In addition, workboots constructed of leather, fiber, and other porous materials are not easily decontaminated.
A different approach is to fasten an external rigid guard made of plastic, fiberglass, or steel over a conventional street shoe. According to this approach, a rigid toe cap or metatarsal guard is placed over the toe end of a street shoe and then secured with a strap which wraps around the heel of the street shoe. This approach has the advantage of providing protection against impact and compression hazards without requiring that the protective device's user remove the street shoes. Thus, the external guard may be worn without carrying the user's street shoes by hand or forcing the user to wear a workboot recently worn by someone else.
Unfortunately, such external rigid guards have several disadvantages. Because external guards are noisy and unattractive, they draw unnecessary attention to the user's foot. By causing the user to feel self-conscious and uncomfortable, external guards interfere with the user's concentration on the business purpose of the visit. Even worse, in some cases an external rigid guard actually increases the risk of injury to the user by creating tripping hazards. External guards include many exposed edges which may catch on a rock, a step, or another protrusion. External guards may also cause unsightly wear to the exterior of the street shoe. In addition, such external guards do not protect the user's foot or the user's street shoes against chemical, electrical, or puncture hazards.
Thus, it would be an advancement in the art to provide foot and street shoe protection which does not require users employing the protection to replace their street shoes with workboots or to supplement them with conventional rigid external guards.
It would be an additional advancement to provide such protection which protects the feet and the street shoes worn by the feet from impact hazards and from compression hazards.
The art would be advanced still further if such protection were provided against chemical hazards, against puncture hazards, and against hazards caused by electricity.
It would also be an advancement to provide such protection without increasing the risk that a person using the protection will trip.
A method and a device providing such protection are disclosed and claimed herein.